Ron Knights said:

I just got done reinstalling all my content again. Then I re-imported all my metadata.

Perhaps I should have done that first? Maybe the metadata was outdated because I had installed and uninstalled so much content?

I can find all my content now. So I can go back and redo Categories.

Yeah sometimes daz loses stuff..

This is why you want to use the same preset, Daz then reverses the chnages made on export when it imports. Otherwise you are having to manually set the topions to invert any effect. You also need to make sure that Blender is similarly not making any changes on import unless it reverses them on export.

This https://www.daz3d.com/shenandoah-for-genesis ? It's for the original Genesis, if iit isn't showing with Filter By Context  checked in Smart Content that may just be a metadata issue.

hillside3d said:

Recently I noticed that a lot of products are missing in smart content.
So I asked google and the daz forum for advice...and I couldn't believe what I saw.

Appearantly a lot of products found in the official daz store don't have the necessary metadata to work properly with their own software.
What's baffling me, is that daz isn't adressing this issue.

This wouldn't bother me if it would only be a few products. But in the last purchase I made, almost half the products I bought were affected. And I bought a lot.

Does the community just accept this? 

A lot of products are missing in smart content. - 

Yep-, always have been.  SmartContent is an idea that has never worked up to the way it was promoted, and everytime DAZ acquires a new bunch of existing products from other stores, the vast majority of them have never been processed into smart content.  

What's baffling me, is that daz isn't adressing this issue.

DAZ hasn't updated their usuer manual in nearly 13 years old, even though it only addresses how to use the no longer licensed 3DL renderer and lists the pre-iray Genesis 2 as the latest figure base.  A large percentage of the catalog don't have read-mes in the product wiki. Why?  I can't speculate as forumn rules don't allow us to do that. 

Does the community just accept this? 

Well, a lot of us simply don't use SmartContent, given that nothing sold by a non-DAZ store is going to work with it anyway, so those of use who don't generally don't care.  For those who do, there are some products that let you convert outside product to SmartContent, but it's quite labor intensive.  Outside of that, it's DAZ's store and their product, so there's not much we can do otherwise except just not buy here.    

I am slowly bringing content that I’ve installed on my laptop over to the newer desktop that I bought last summer.  On the laptop,

• I install from the DAZ3D store to an external HDD using DIM.
   
• I install content from other stores (Renderosity, RuntimeDNA, etc.) manually, create a Daz Studio Product for each content and add basic metadata so that I can view the content in Smart Content as well as the Content Library.

Last summer, after much deliberation, I installed all DAZ3D content onto the desktop using DIM rather than connecting the external HDD or copying the HDD’s files to the desktop.  About 1,300 of the 3,200 installed content, though, still have some or all of their items categorized in Lost and Found.

Today, I connected the external HDD to the desktop to finally explore how to deal with installed Poser content.  In Daz Studio (4.24.0.3) on the desktop, I can see the installed content in the HDD’s Poser Format in the Content Library with no problem.  However, I’d also like to see it in Smart Content as I can on the laptop.

Is there a file (or files) that I can copy from the laptop to the desktop so that Daz Studio shows the Poser content in Smart Content also?  UserData, perhaps?  Other?

I recently bought RiverSoft Art’s Content Wizard but it only works on zip files that are configured for Daz Studio; it won’t handle Poser configured zip files.  Or is there a way to use it to generate metadata for the Poser files so that the Poser content appears in Smart Content on the desktop?

Thanks in advance.

Richard Haseltine said:

Did you use the Blender preset for both exporting the OBJ and importing the morph? Did the Blender Import/Export leave all settings of the mesh alone? Somewhere, in DS or Blender, the X/Y axes are being swapped and possibly inverted but then the reverse step isn't being applied.

Thank you both for the suggestions to the both of you.

Very strangley It stops rotating if I scale it up in the morph loader for some reason... I ipmorted the morph with the blender option for geometry. If I leave the scaling at the default it imprts the morph and when I apply it it rotates, often through its self, (turning inside out to a 90 degree angle) but if I up the scale to 1000% and in the morph loader and apply it, its fine and applies the morph correclty without the model transforming axis. very strange...

any ideas why this is the case? I alway export on "to blender settings" and import back to daz "from blender" settings. I have never had this issue before. but better than nothing I guess.

EDIT: My bad I realised for some reason the X Y Z axis conversion keeps defaulting to a setting where Z and Y are swapped everytime I  load DAZ. not sure why it does it but I found the issue. Thank you.

ArtAngel said:

since 2014 California has been utilizing such and studying road usage charges. Since a ton of people went to green electric vehicles, California lost a bunch of gas tax money which is mainly used for road repair and maintenance. Lori Wilson recently authored a bill (AB 1421) which was passed which orders California to design a mileage tax system, study it, and report back with a plan to implement it. So California is considering a mileage tax, pending the January 2027 report. Also if anyone has a dummy (non-human) in their passenger seat (for cheating FasTrak) I might be interested in buying it to throw face-down on my front lawn for April 1st .

This is a vicious circle, as the main reason electric vehicle usage has become so high in California (over 35% of all EVs in the U.S.) is that the state currently has the highest gas prices in the U.S., currently nearly $7 a gallon, even higher than than runner up Hawaii which has to import all their fuel by boat.  Unfortunately, in the case of a mileage tax, the group that would be most affected would be the agriculture industry, which at over 100 billion annually accounts for over 12% of all produce grown in the U.S., and would cause yet another escalation of food costs across the entire country.  I'm a native Californian myself and have no intention of moving back there as the cost of living there has gotten beyond stupid... 

fayke-1 said:

So I took the time off today to figure this out, smoothed the ear as suggested. Worked faster and looks good, great. Now i'm fighting with brave's AI overlook trying to figure out how to get the obj from blender back into DAZ and recognizable as a genesis 9 figure again. AI is kinda stupid at times but I think it's figured out because the only good luck is dumb luck.

I needed to use the transfer utility to copy the face groups and surfaces to the no ears mesh BUT the no ears mesh facegroups in geometry editor's tool settings had a default group with 0 faces that was leftover from before the transfer utility was used. Deleting that made the H.material work.Also should note I had to change the scene identification for the no ears mesh to match base genesis 9 figure and manually create the surfaces (maybe not but i did this before using transfer utility so i'll mark it down just in case) using geometry editor.

This has been extremely frustrating and made me question my own existence and sanity, so hopefully this post helps some other newbie save themselves some time. Thanks for the info and for taking the time to read my frustrated word vomit.

You just need to make a G9 figure earless by using a Morph, so as barbult said,  you should've imported OBJ as a morph by using Morph Loader Pro rather than Transfer Utility (TU is mostly used for rigging conformers ~~ ), just like the 2nd screenshot I showed you above.

Then export the figure to Unity / UE as a game asset (direct export / import or by using Daz to Unity / Daz to Unreal bridges....).  Or maybe you want to decimate its mesh in Blender or by using https://www.daz3d.com/decimator-for-daz-studio

1138648241 said:

Choose the BSDF method. After performing Diffeomorphic import, a large number of halos and volume fog will appear.

Okay I'm not quite up on the jargon. Halos and Volume fog? 

Did you use the Blender preset for both exporting the OBJ and importing the morph? Did the Blender Import/Export leave all settings of the mesh alone? Somewhere, in DS or Blender, the X/Y axes are being swapped and possibly inverted but then the reverse step isn't being applied.

Diffeomorphic adds metadata for the tools to work, so it only works with figures exported and imported with diffeomorphic, not with figures imported or exported with other tools. Also it may not work if you change the rig structure by hand that seems the case in your description. You have to use the diffeomorphic tools to operate on the rig, thus the metadata is updated.

The easy way is to use easy import. Then you can reference the wiki to use the various tools by hand, including rigging.

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Import/Easy Import DAZ

https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Setup/Rigging

steps:

1. in daz studio export the dbz
2. in blender easy import with G9 preset
3. convert to MHX or rigify, you can't use auto-rig with diffeomorphic

Because you imported OBJ as a new figure into DS and the figure has a wrong Node Name ... then Mat. Presets cannot apply. 

Change its Node Name to Genesis8Female or Genesis8_1Female via Edit > Figure > Scene Identification... Correct Surface names with Geometry Editor, then Material Presets will work. However, since you recreated a new surface for ears but didn't recreate / imported any new UV Set for the Ears surface, you're not able to get correct textures on earless area...

I don't understand why you did the work in such a way of creating new ear surfaces... this way would be pretty cumbersome even if you want to make a another standalone "G8F figure" ~~

Instead, to make a G8 earless, you just need to sculpt its Mesh (in Base Resolution) with Smooth brush + a Mask + Symmetry mode, then import its OBJ as an Earless morph. (ss1) 

Edit: To remove texture of ears if needed, you can retouch Face texture map in Ps, Affinity or GIMP with Healing Brush or sth. similar, then assign the map to Ears surface.

That sounds like a metadata issue, the RSL/MDL tags are not on the thunmbnails but are added by DS according to the database entries.

I just got done reinstalling all my content again. Then I re-imported all my metadata.

Perhaps I should have done that first? Maybe the metadata was outdated because I had installed and uninstalled so much content?

I can find all my content now. So I can go back and redo Categories.

Despite the positive seeming title this is more of a call for help, I recently got into DAZ on the side and holy smokes is it an exercise in patience! :)

This was probably asked and answered multiple times, sorry if this is the wrong place for the topic I don't normally do forum stuff. 

Currently for practice I'm trying to take the genesis 8 female base mesh into Blender so I can remove the ear and replace it with a flat surface, like an alien head or something.

Using diffeomorphic, got mesh into blender. So far so good > Select loop around ear and hide it, press L on the ear itself to select the whole ear, press alt+h to unhide the loop i hid earlier and deselect the loop > Delete ear > Create polygons in new hole to make a flat surface > Smooth the area little by little in sculpt mode so it's flat but still organic > Unwrap uv's > Rescale/Realign/Reposition UV island over ear UV to blend texture > Export/Import to DAZ > Apply PBR Skin shader > Try to apply literally any material > Doesn't work? Mesh stays white > Manually apply textures to face, body, arms, it works > try to apply skin material again > Fail, you suck, terrible artist, go work at mcdonalds. 

So... where did I go wrong?

I attached an image from DAZ to show the skin "working" and also the error message that comes up when I try to apply a skin material and the other image is the UV's in blender. I'm not worried about the visible seam although it lined up and blends kinda nice without playing with the vertices tooooo much. My issue is when I try to apply materials or assets... computa says no. Any help with this, or any general tips for DAZ that will cause less ulcers moving forward would be fan-fricken-tastic!

I too suffer from this (and have for 4 years now...not just with Materials, also with Scenes/SubSets/and Poses) and since DAZ seems to want to pretend it doesn't exist, I had to come up with my own way...

First of all the PROBLEM is with CMS database, and when a NEW SAVE first writes the "/Default/Saved Files/WHATEVERITIS" catagory field....

So one work around for a fast save that read about a couple years ago,is to right clicking ont content Library tab and choosing "Stop CMS/SMART" Do your saving then Right Click Content Library tab Again and Choose "Stop CMS/Immediate" and Right Click Content Library AGAIN... (getting old....) and Choose "Start CMS".  So you will see that when you do this it will save the file in under a Second.... EXCEPT now you have no Meta.... So you're going to have to manually but the meta data in with the Content DB editor....

Now you could also Save it outside of Daz in a TEMP location for a fast save and then copy it into your "Materials" file for the Asset, still won't have metadata and also will the wrong absolute path in file, (though I'm sure you know daz will ignore this and use a relative path for the file..)

Well that gets old too...

So the MAIN way I do this now, when I am Setting up my Character (Subsets),Wearables and Material Presets is to Create ALL the files FIRST as a TEXT file in the Character or ASSETS Folder...

and then change the .txt to .duf 

Once I have that done I go into folder in DAZ for the file I made, hit refresh... and I see the ! (icon) now I right click Content Library Tab and Open the Content DB Editor.... and then select the new "Material files" Up top, then again in the Catagories, and Then Right and choose "Add Custome Categories to Selected File(s)" I then go to a list I made in text file, of ALL the "Default/Saved Files/"  Catagories that Daz uses.... and Copy this:

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Materials

And then Paste that into the Path(s): field, Hit Accept, Then Accept Again.... and THEN with the Asset selected I hit the (+) sing and save out a Material choosing the file made, and it will save WITH metadata in a second...

So here is a list of ALL the Default/Saved Files that DAZ writes when you are using the (+) sign to save ( there are more that it uses for when saving out as a Figure/Asset, and if you are having LONG saves while doing THAT, I would suggest NOT checking Set Catagory.... Because THAT is the same field that is causing the Slow down for the these Items... With it unchecked the Asset will save in a few seconds, not minutes...):

-----------------------------------------

/Default/Saved Files/Scene

/Default/Saved Files/Set

/Default/Saved Files/Prop

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Wearables

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Materials

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Materials/Hierarchical

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Layered-Image

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Shader

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Simulation-Settings

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Pose

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Pose/Hierarchical

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Morph/Apply

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Properties

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Camera

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Render-Settings

/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Light

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

It is Ridiculous to have to do it this way but it is MUCH faster then waiting 5 or 10 minutes PER first save of each item.... also if you later wanted to add a new preset to that file, you can "COPY" that catagory for the Item

from a similar one to a New MANUALLY created txt file turned into a duf with the method mentioned above (so it is visible in your folder in daz as an ! (icon), then in Content DB Editor with THAT and similar preset type (ie Material) that has Already been saved, open the triangle of the previously saved one under catagories and Right click on the"/Default/Saved Files/Preset/Materials" that it already has and choose Copy Selected Catagories to Listed Files...

Either way listed above requires alot of MANUAL work.... and while It will Save you time on the Saves, you are SPENDING time doing it Manually, So I too would love it if DAZ would fix this, The simplest way would be for them to create a Box that could be ticked to Save Metadata or NOT save Metadata.  The Code line already exists as it IS an option you can toggle for Metadata in one of Riversofts Converter Scripts... (don't recall which one)

Last but not least there is Yet ANOTHER option... And that would be to create a new BAREBONES Content Library all together using the Content Directory Manager... Of course doing this requires ALOT of switching Back and forth between the new LOW ASSET BAREBONES Library, and your Main Library which you will THEN also note that everything you quickly saved in your new BAREBONES Library, shows up with NO metadata in your MAIN content Library.....So if you want them to have Metadata in your MAIN you will have to add that manually.... 

Which is why I eventually settled on the Method of just Manually creating the files myself and then manually adding the Metadata to them before I make my first real save in my MAIN Library.

Hello, 

I am trying to rig a Genesis 9. I tried Rigigy, MHX and Auto-Rig, everything failed. I don't know what i did wrong and/or what I didn't do. I wish someone could point me toward a tutorial or give me a hint I could work on. Here is what I did until now :

1. I create a generic Genesis 9 model. I only give him a face, then export it with diffeomorphic in base resolution and View and Render Subd at 0. I tried to export it both in A pose and T pose, with the same end result.

2. I import it in Blender with only the base Genesis 9 settings.

3. Once in Blender, I merge by distance and do an All Transform te be sure everything is at the same scale.

4.I try to rig, as written above I tried the diffeomorphic rigify and MHX. I tried importing with the Daz bridge and using the blender rigify and also tried with auto-rig pro, nothing worked.

8. I also tried to scale my character by 100 before binding the rig. But it did not work neither.

Every time I end up with a unusable monster who can't even move his legs or arms because some widget are missing or don't work.

Thanks in advance for your wise informations.

Fred

MrRogerSmith said:

jmucchiello said:

barbult said:

Copied and pasted from a post I made in April 2025: 

With Geometry Editor tool active, you can export the "curves" hair, move the vertices in a modeler, and with the Geometry Editor still active, import your modified OBJ to DS to create a morph. You do not have to be a PA to do that. I have made several morphs for PA dForce (strand-based) hair products that way.  I have posted this in the forums a couple of times at least. You can even simulate in DS and export that and reimport it as a morph. The key is to have the Geometry Editor tool active during export and import. There can be millions of vertices in some of these hairs, so the morph creation can take some time.

How does someone who doesn't even understand "export the curves hair" step and has never run a modeler even begin to do this? Asking for a friend. :) I posted elsewhere looking for help with upside down hair and this seems like the right solution, if only I knew anything about Blender.

 

You hide everything in the scene except the hair, put it at base resolution, activate the geometry tool, and export the hair as an .obj via the File menu.  WP Guru has some good videos like this one showing how to export/reimport to make morphs in Blender.

The OBJ export options now include one to export only seelcted geometry, so the hiding step is no longer required.

To be honest though I wouldn't start my journey in Blender with these strand-based hairs.  They are quite dense and trying to make the morph in Blender's edit mode isn't nearly as easy as sculpting it.  Working with so many vertices is probably a bit too advanced for someone brand new to Blender.

jmucchiello said:

barbult said:

Copied and pasted from a post I made in April 2025: 

With Geometry Editor tool active, you can export the "curves" hair, move the vertices in a modeler, and with the Geometry Editor still active, import your modified OBJ to DS to create a morph. You do not have to be a PA to do that. I have made several morphs for PA dForce (strand-based) hair products that way.  I have posted this in the forums a couple of times at least. You can even simulate in DS and export that and reimport it as a morph. The key is to have the Geometry Editor tool active during export and import. There can be millions of vertices in some of these hairs, so the morph creation can take some time.

How does someone who doesn't even understand "export the curves hair" step and has never run a modeler even begin to do this? Asking for a friend. :) I posted elsewhere looking for help with upside down hair and this seems like the right solution, if only I knew anything about Blender.

 

You hide everything in the scene except the hair, put it at base resolution, activate the geometry tool, and export the hair as an .obj via the File menu.  WP Guru has some good videos like this one showing how to export/reimport to make morphs in Blender.

To be honest though I wouldn't start my journey in Blender with these strand-based hairs.  They are quite dense and trying to make the morph in Blender's edit mode isn't nearly as easy as sculpting it.  Working with so many vertices is probably a bit too advanced for someone brand new to Blender.